The Delhi High Court has stepped into a trademark dispute between two players in the fastener industry, and the order tells a story that practitioners will recognise instantly. A company built on three decades of use of the mark HP has accused a smaller trader of dressing up an identical mark behind the letters ISI, hoping the certification prefix would carry it past the courts. Justice Jyoti Singh did not agree and granted an ex parte ad interim injunction on 06.07.2026 in favour of the plaintiff. The case, registered as CS(COMM) 693/2026 and titled Landmark Crafts Limited v. Shalini Garg Proprietor Of Shree Mange Ram And Sons, offers a clean illustration of how courts treat dominant features in composite marks and how procedural shortcuts under the Commercial Courts Act operate when urgency is genuinely established.
Introduction
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The plaintiff traces its rights back to 1995, when Mr Pankaj Lidoo, a Kashmiri Pandit displaced from the valley in the early nineties, coined the mark HP to stand for Honour and Pride and began using it through a sole proprietorship called M/s Landmark Engineers. The business grew steadily, and Mr Lidoo incorporated M/s Landmark Fasteners Private Limited in 2002. In 2007 he and most of the same directors floated another entity, M/s Landmark Craft Private Limited, which later became Landmark Craft Limited and now trades as the plaintiff in this suit. The order records that the corporate history was not merely a paper trail but a continuous carrying forward of the same goodwill and the same trademark rights from one entity to the next.
Landmark Crafts holds registration for the HP mark under application number 1566805 with a user date of 15.12.1995, and it also owns TM number 5600411 covering self drilling screws and blind rivets with the same user date. The plaintiff placed extensive material before the court to demonstrate the strength of the mark. Its products reach the market through a dealer and distributor network spread across North, West, South and East India, and sales are also routed through the company website and through listings on Justdial and Indiamart. Revenue and advertising figures were placed on record for the period between financial year 2014 15 and financial year 2025-26, and the company also engaged the cricketer Ishant Sharma as its brand ambassador. Certifications from the Bureau of Indian Standards, Accredium, and CRISIL, together with testing through the Shri Ram Institute for Industrial Research, formed part of the plaintiff’s case on quality and reputation, alongside a client list that includes GAIL India, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, and the Delhi Jal Board.
Landmark Crafts also pointed to two earlier proceedings that had already tested the strength of the HP mark. The company successfully resisted a rectification petition in Ganraj Enterprises versus Landmark Crafts Limited And Another, an appeal under Section 91 of the Trade Marks Act 1999 in which the Registrar’s earlier order rejecting the rectification plea was upheld. A Division Bench of the Delhi High Court had also dismissed an appeal against an interlocutory injunction that a District Judge had earlier granted in the plaintiff’s favour, a decision the plaintiff relied on to show that its rights had already survived appellate scrutiny.
The Dispute With Shalini Garg
The defendant, Shalini Garg, trades as the sole proprietor of Shree Mange Ram And Sons and sells metal bolts, fasteners, threaded fasteners, nuts, bolts, and screws, goods that sit squarely within the same market as the plaintiff’s products. In January 2026 Landmark Crafts discovered that the defendant had filed a trademark application, for a device mark on a proposed to be used basis dated 28.08.2024, seeking registration in Class 6 for goods that overlap heavily with the plaintiff’s own catalogue of screws, washers, and metal fasteners. The defendant’s mark places the letters ISI vertically ahead of the letters HP, and it was this arrangement that triggered the plaintiff’s objection.
Landmark Crafts moved quickly once it learned of the application, filing opposition proceedings before the Trade Marks Registry on 22.01.2026, and those proceedings remain pending. The company also issued a cease and desist notice on the same date, which the defendant received on 27.01.2026 and answered on 29.01.2026, denying any infringement or passing off and asserting her own use of the mark since 2024. Landmark Crafts then attempted pre institution mediation as required for commercial suits, but the defendant did not respond to the process, and the District Legal Services Authority issued a non starter report on 06.04.2026. During those mediation efforts the defendant apparently gave an assurance that she would stop using the mark, yet the order records that she continued to do so, which is what finally pushed the plaintiff to file the suit.
Arguments Advanced
Senior Advocate J Sai Deepak, appearing for the plaintiff along with Stuti Wason and Vipin Wason, built the case around three decades of continuous, open, and extensive use of the HP mark, arguing that this history had made the mark distinctive and exclusively associated with Landmark Crafts under Section 28 of the Trade Marks Act 1999. The submission on the defendant’s mark was pointed and, in the end, persuasive. Counsel argued that the defendant had not invented a new mark at all but had simply parked the letters ISI in front of the plaintiff’s registered HP mark, and that ISI carries no independent trademark significance because it is a certification mark administered by the Bureau of Indian Standards, incapable of being monopolised by any single trader. On that reading, the ISI prefix was not a point of difference but a device meant to suggest that the defendant’s goods were HP branded products carrying official certification, precisely the kind of association Section 28 protects against.
Before reaching the merits, the plaintiff also sought and obtained exemption from pre institution mediation under Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act 2015 read with Section 151 of the Code of Civil Procedure. Justice Jyoti Singh granted this exemption on the footing that the plaintiff was seeking urgent interim relief, applying the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Yamini Manohar v. T.K.D. Keerthi and the Division Bench ruling of the Delhi High Court in Chandra Kishore Chaurasia v. RA Perfumery Works Private Limited. Both authorities confirm that a plaintiff genuinely seeking urgent relief need not first exhaust a mediation process that would defeat the purpose of approaching the court in the first place.
Court’s Analysis On Deceptive Similarity
Justice Jyoti Singh examined the rival marks side by side and found that Landmark Crafts had made out a prima facie case for an ex parte ad interim injunction. The order treats the ISI element in the defendant’s mark as decorative rather than distinctive, holding that HP remains the dominant and recognisable feature of the composite mark despite the letters placed above it. This finding tracks a principle that recurs across Indian trademark jurisprudence, namely that courts assess the overall impression created by a mark and give weight to its dominant feature rather than picking apart every added element in isolation. A certification indicator that any compliant trader is free to use cannot function as a badge of origin, and stacking it in front of someone else’s registered word mark does not create a new mark so much as it borrows the old one with a fig leaf attached.
The court also found that the two businesses share trade channels and a common consumer base, both selling screws, bolts, and fasteners through similar retail and wholesale networks. That overlap made the likelihood of confusion concrete rather than theoretical, and the order records a clear finding that the balance of convenience favoured the plaintiff and that Landmark Crafts would suffer irreparable harm if the injunction were withheld pending trial. These are the three ingredients that Indian courts routinely require before granting interim relief in a trademark suit, a prima facie case, balance of convenience, and irreparable injury, and the order addresses each one directly rather than treating them as boxes to tick.
The Interim Injunction And Directions
Having reached these findings, the court restrained Shalini Garg and anyone acting on her behalf from selling, offering for sale, displaying, advertising, promoting, or marketing self drilling screws, blind rivets, metal bolts, fasteners, or any allied product under the impugned mark or any other mark identical or deceptively similar to the plaintiff’s registered HP marks, whether the conduct amounts to infringement or to passing off. This restraint operates until the next date of hearing rather than as a final determination, since the suit itself has only just been registered.
The procedural directions that follow are fairly standard for a commercial suit of this kind. Summons will issue to the defendant, returnable before the Joint Registrar on 20.08.2026, and the defendant has thirty days from receipt of summons to file a written statement along with an affidavit admitting or denying the plaintiff’s documents. The plaintiff may file a replication within thirty days of receiving that written statement, and the notice on the injunction application itself is returnable before the court on 04.11.2026. The plaintiff has also been directed to comply with Order XXXIX Rule 3 of the Code of Civil Procedure within two weeks, which requires prompt communication of the injunction application and the order to the defendant.
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Conclusion
Nobody invented a wildly new legal principle here, and the outcome should not surprise anyone who has followed how Indian courts treat certification marks tacked onto someone else’s registered wordmark. What makes the order worth reading is the discipline with which Justice Jyoti Singh applied settled principles to a fairly transparent attempt at circumvention. Placing ISI ahead of HP was never going to create genuine distinctiveness, and the court called that out without much fuss.
I also think the Section 12A exemption deserves attention from practitioners handling urgent trademark matters, because it confirms that a defendant’s silence during pre institution mediation, followed by a broken assurance to stop infringing conduct, gives a plaintiff a solid factual basis to skip straight to court rather than restart a process the defendant has already shown no interest in engaging with. For a company that has spent three decades building a mark, an order like this one is a reminder that consistent enforcement, not just registration, is what keeps a trademark defensible.
